how to set colorscale with reference to dates in plotly python

Question

first question so go easy on me please! I'm trying to create a scatter plot in plotly where the points are coloured according to a datetime column, but it seems to error out. it works fine if I set the color to, say, a numeric column. is there a way to do this please?

Sample code below. if I change color to, say np.arange(0,graph_data.shape[0]) it would work fine but the colorbar labels would be meaningless.

    fig1 = go.Figure()

    fig1.add_trace(go.Scatter(
                        x=graph_data['x_data'],
                        y=graph_data['y_data'],
                        mode='markers',
                        marker={
                            'size': 15,
                            'opacity': 0.95,
                            'line': {'width': 0.5, 'color': 'white'},
                            'color': graph_data['date'],
                            'colorbar': {'title': 'Date'},
                            'colorscale': 'Viridis'
                            }
                        )

Answer 1

There may be a better way to do this, but one possible workaround is to convert your datetime to seconds after a given date. You could try the following using the datetime module:

int(datetime.datetime.utcnow().timestamp())

This will then be an integer which will be understood by the scatter function.